Towards Automatic Bloodstain Pattern Analysis through Cognitive Robots

Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA) is a forensic discipline that plays a key role in performing a reconstruction of the crime scene related to blood shedding events. By studying the distribution, size and shape of bloodstains, BPA supports worldwide investigation agencies (US FBI, Italian Carabinieri and so on) in identifying the dynamics of a certain act of violence and evaluating the credibility of statements provided by a witness, a victim, or a suspect. However, in spite of its importance, this forensic discipline is still mainly based on manual approaches, making the analysis of a crime scene long, tedious and potentially imperfect. This paper is aimed at presenting a proposal for a robotic framework to automate the BPA in all its steps. In particular, the robotic framework is composed of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) capable of navigating the crime scene, detecting bloodstains, computing the points of origin and preparing a technical report describing the bloody event.